Around the corner the sunbeam danced with the wind into Mott Street,
lifted the blouse of a Chinaman and made it play tag with his pig-tail.
It used him so roughly that he was glad to skip from it down a
cellar-way that gave out fumes of opium strong enough to scare even the
north wind from its purpose. The soles of his felt shoes showed as he
disappeared down the ladder that passed for cellar-steps. Down there,
where daylight never came, a group of yellow, almond-eyed men were
bending over a table playing fan-tan. Their very souls were in the game,
every faculty of the mind bent on the issue and the stake. The one
blouse that was indifferent to what went on was stretched on a mat in a
corner. One end of a clumsy pipe was in his mouth, the other held over a
little spirit-lamp on the divan on which he lay. Something spluttered in
the flame with a pungent, unpleasant smell. The smoker took a long
draught, inhaling the white smoke, then sank back on his couch in
senseless content.

Upstairs tiptoed the noiseless felt shoes, bent on some house errand, to
the "household" floors above, where young white girls from the tenements
of The Bend and the East Side live in slavery worse, if not more
galling, than any of the galley with ball and chain--the slavery of the
pipe. Four, eight, sixteen--twenty odd such "homes" in this tenement,
disgracing the very name of home and family, for marriage and troth are
not in the bargain.

In one room, between the half-drawn curtains of which the sunbeam works
its way in, three girls are lying on as many bunks, smoking all. They
are very young, "under age," though each and every one would glibly
swear in court to the satisfaction of the police that she is sixteen,
and therefore free to make her own bad choice. Of these, one was brought
up among the rugged hills of Maine; the other two are from the tenement
crowds, hardly missed there. But their companion? She is twirling the
sticky brown pill over the lamp, preparing to fill the bowl of her pipe
with it. As she does so, the sunbeam dances across the bed, kisses the
red spot on her cheek that betrays the secret her tyrant long has known,
though to her it is hidden yet--that the pipe has claimed its victim and
soon will pass it on to the Potter's Field.

"Nell," says one of her chums in the other bunk, something stirred
within her by the flash--"Nell, did you hear from the old farm to home
since you come here?"

Nell turns half around, with